Building network automation solutions

6 week online course

A few days ago we ran an interesting test: a Telepresence session from Slovenia (somewhere in Central Europe for those of you that cannot keep track of all the emerging minicountries) to US West Coast across the Internet. The session crossed numerous Service Providers and at least one VPN tunnel, but the quality was still amazingly good … you can watch it in this YouTube video.

We’re running a two day IPv6 technical workshop next week. Its contents are equivalent to the IPv6 Fundamentals course with “a bit” longer days and without the lab exercises. It’s ideal for those that need to understand the IPv6 technology but don’t yet need the hands-on experience.

A while ago a senior Service Provider network designer told me that they have serious issues with IPv6 deployment as IPv6 requires a separate PPPoE session from the CPE devices which significantly increases their licensing costs. The statement really surprised me; PPP was designed to be a multi-protocol environment and it’s very easy to configure IPv4 and IPv6 over a single PPP session in Cisco IOS. I think I might have tracked down the source of this “information” to the 6deploy IPv6 and DSL presentation which states on Page 11 that “Separate PPP sessions are established between the Subscriber’s systems (or CPE) and the BBRAS for IPv6 and IPv4 traffic”.

Being too Cisco-centric, I cannot figure out whether this claim has any merit, as it clearly does not apply to Cisco IOS. Are there really boxes out there that are so stupid that they cannot run two protocols across a single PPPoE session?

One of the most common questions asked by our enterprise customers is “Who needs IPv6?” Since IPv6 does not add any significant new functionality (apart from larger address space), you can’t gain much by deploying it in an enterprise network … unless you’re huge enough that the private IPv4 address space (RFC 1918) becomes too confining for you. A good case study is Halliburton; you’ll find the details in Global IPv6 Strategies: From Business Analysis to Operational Planning book (my review).

The need for IPv6 deployment is one of the topics discussed in the Enterprise IPv6 Deployment workshop. You can attend an online version of the workshop or we can organize a dedicated event for your team.

Last week I’ve described how you can use EEM to detect long-term interface congestion which could indicate denial-of-service attack. The mechanism I’ve used (the averaged interface load) is pretty slow; using the lowest possible value for the load-interval (30 seconds) it takes almost a minute to detect a DOS attack (see below).

If you want to detect outbound bursts, you can do better: you can monitor the increase in the number of output drops over a short period of time.

Obviously you cannot use this mechanism to detect inbound (potentially DOS-related) floods as the drops occur on the Service Provider’s edge router.

Various polling and averaging options, including in-depth discussion of hysteresis, are covered in the Embedded Event Manager (EEM) workshop. You can attend an online version of the workshop or we can organize a dedicated event for your networking team.

I’ve had an interesting discussion with Nicolas who optimized my OSPF neighbor loss EEM applet assuming the OSPF-5-ADJCHG message reports only OSPF neighbor state transitions from DOWN to FULL and from FULL to DOWN. I knew I'd seen stranger messages in my lab and was able to produce these ones after fumbling with OSPF configurations of two routers connected with a serial link:

Someone sent me an interesting question a while ago: “is it possible to detect DOS flooding with an EEM applet?” Of course it is (assuming the DOS attack results in very high load on the Internet-facing interface) and the best option is the EEM interface event detector.

Interface event detector is just one of the many topics covered in the Embedded Event Manager (EEM) workshop. You can attend an online version of the workshop or we can organize a dedicated event for your networking team.

With the recent Cisco’s push into the Data Center environment and all the (not so very unreasonable) fuss around IPv4 address depletion and imminent need for IPv6, I wanted to check whether an all-Cisco shop could do the first step: deploy IPv6 on Internet-facing production servers. If you follow the various design guidelines, your setup will have at least the following elements (and I bet someone from Cisco has already told you that you also need XML firewall, Ironport and WAAS appliance):

Several readers told me that the Hierarchical Queuing Framework introduced in IOS releases 12.4(20)T and 15.0 (why do I always have the urge to write 12.5?) works much better than CB-WFQ. After spending several hours trying to break HQF, I have to concur with them: Cisco’s engineers did a splendid job. However, the HQF behavior might be slightly counterintuitive to those that became too familiar with CB-WFQ.

Most of the respondents to my last week’s challenge got it almost right. The minor (common) error was the assumption that police rate percent 50 would result in a TCP session getting 50% of the bandwidth. Eyal got that right: the TCP throughput is always significantly lower than that due to frequent drops caused by low burst sizes assumed by the police command and resulting TCP restarts (the most I was able to push through was around 90 kbps; half of the bandwidth would be 128 kbps).

Many respondents got the third case (bandwidth class, police class and default-class all active at the same time) wrong. Vaidotas was guessing in the right direction and Petr knows the correct answer, but did not want to spoil the fun. Here’s the surprising result: the bandwidth class gets almost all the bandwidth. Sometimes the TCP sessions in other classes wouldn’t even start.

ITU (the organization formerly known as CCITT) is having a bit of a relevance problem these days: its flagship technological achievements, including X.25, ISDN, ATM and SDH are dead or headed toward oblivion … and a former pariah, a group of geeks, is stealing the show and rolling out the Internet. No wonder their bureaucrats are having a hard time figuring out how to justify their existence. For years they’ve been lamenting how much they’ve contributed to the Internet (highly recommended reading for Monty Python fans) and how their precious contributions were unacknowledged. Now they came forth with a “wonderful” idea: the history of IPv4 address allocation proves that the wealthy nations and early adopters managed to grab disproportionate parts of the IPv4 address space (well, that’s true), so they made it their mission to protect the poor and underdeveloped countries in the brave new IPv6 world. In short, they want to become an independent address allocation entity (RIR). It looks like another worldwide bureaucracy is exactly what we need on top of all the other problems we have with IPv6 deployment.

Last week I’ve published twoposts that deserve a follow-up/summary. Don’t worry, it’s coming. I’ve been extremely busy working on a customized version of the “Market trends in Service Provider networks” presentation that I’m delivering tomorrow … and I’ve managed to stumble across two “interesting” topics involving ITU; the first one is described in the next post and the second one needs a bit more investigation.

I have to admit I was somewhat surprised by the lab test results I’ve published in my previous CB-WFQ post. It looks like we’ve been fed misleading information about (classic) CB-WFQ behavior for years.

Don’t tell me that things are completely different with HQF implemented in IOS releases 12.4(late)T and 15.0. I know that … but 95+% of the installed base do not use those releases.

Let’s see whether you can figure out what my next lab test results showed. I’ve been running three parallel TTCP sessions on ports 5001, 5002 and 5003 across a 256 kbit point-to-point link. Here’s the relevant part of my router configuration:

Decades ago when I was still in high school and working on a programming project during the summer break, an IT old-timer gave me the following bit of advice: “Remember, God created professions so that everyone could do the job he’s qualified to do”. It took me years before I understood what he had been trying to tell me, but this seems to be an industry-wide disease. Judging by some of the e-mails I receive a lot of people who are proficient in other IT specialties think they can configure the routers with a little help of good uncle Google and free support from fellow bloggers.

It seems the “ability” of a “generic” IT employee to tackle any problem somewhat related to IT is also unique to our industry. Last week a woodworker was installing my kitchen and flatly refused to connect the electric cable of the ceramic cooktop to the wall outlet citing potential liabilities (please remember: I’m not living in US but in Central Europe). An HTML programmer asked to configure the enterprise firewall might not be so reluctant. Why do you think some people in our industry believe they are universal engineers?

I am overly familiar with weighted fair queuing (I was developing QoS training for Cisco when WFQ just left the drawing board) and was thus always wondering how they manage to implement that behavior with WFQ structures. A comment made by Petr Lapukhov re-triggered my curiosity and prompted me to do some actual lab tests.

Last week I’ve delivered another very successful IPv6 Deployment in Enterprise Networks presentation. It’s amazing how far into the interesting details we usually get even though the presentation is purposefully a high-level one. This time we’ve been discussing the liabilities the Service Providers might get exposed to when using Large Scale NAT and whether the enterprise networks using HTTP proxies for Internet access could avoid the migration to IPv6.

If you want to understand the real impact of the recent Data Center hype without getting pulled into the technology morass the vendors so copiously spread in their white papers, read the Foundation of Green IT book published by Prentice Hall. Its author, Marty Poniatowski, uses two case studies to illustrate enormous savings that can be realized through server and storage consolidation. I loved the first half of the book: the author avoids the technology issues (I loved the introduction to RAID: “I do not cover RAID background … the Internet has a wealth of information on RAID”) and uses real-life data gathered in actual project to illustrate the savings. Each case study has several chapters, ranging from starting point discovery through implementation plans and ROI analysis; exactly what you need if you’re considering going down the data center redesign path. The “Desktop Virtualization” and “Data Replication and Disk Technology Advancements” chapters are thrown in for good measure.

The author makes the server and storage consolidation case studies even more interesting by describing actual products/solutions and inserting screenshots of actual reports throughout the text. Not surprisingly, he’s describing what he knows best: HP servers, EMC storage and VMware virtualization; a clear indication how far Cisco has to go to win the hearts and minds of the data center market.

The author

Ivan Pepelnjak (CCIE#1354 Emeritus), Independent Network Architect at ipSpace.net, has been designing and implementing large-scale data communications networks as well as teaching and writing books about advanced internetworking technologies since 1990.